


Wings on Their Heels

by River_Linden



Category: Mirror's Edge, Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Crossover, F/F, F/M, Sports
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-05-12
Packaged: 2019-04-28 01:28:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14438553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/River_Linden/pseuds/River_Linden
Summary: In which Faith and Chell are track athletes from neighbor schools.





	1. Chapter 1

The runners from Augusta and Laurelhurst had made it their custom to practice five hundred meters of hurdles, instead of the three hundred they ran at meets. The runners met four afternoons a week, down by the lakeside in MacArthur Park. In the park, there was a paved jogging track and a dock for kayaks. There were picnic tables and a handful of concrete fire pits. Around the lake, there were benches, aging and splintery, names engraved on their brass plaques and initials scratched into their wood planks with pocket knives. Joggers, ducks, and oblivious couples passed each other by as they made circles around MacArthur Lake.

The park was on a gentle slope, halfway between the two schools. Augusta High was up the hill, trim and tidy, gleaming and glass. Laurelhurst High was down the hill, under a thin film of soot, full of broken bottles and the smell of smoke. The park was none of these things, neither a rich man’s nor a poor man’s. It was sparsely wooded, warm and sunlit, and just the littlest bit wild.

The unsanctioned practices were on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, from six to seven. Each of these afternoons, at ten minutes to six, the two team captains would arrive at the same picnic table, put down their bags, and nod a greeting to each other. Every practice they would spot each other at the same time, Celeste as she came from below, Caroline from higher up.

It was a warm early evening in April, and the two team captains met gazes from across the green as they walked towards the meeting-place. Celeste waved. Caroline nodded.

“How’s attendance looking?” Caroline asked as both captains sat at the table.

Celeste dropped her bag on the ground beside her and shrugged. “No one texted me to make excuses.”

“Mm.” Caroline looked at her watch, then up. “The equinox was two weeks ago today.”

“More daylight is good,” Celeste grunted as she rotated her feet up onto the bench beside her. She suppressed a yawn, then undid the laces of her boots with a few quick tugs.

“I suppose it is.”

Celeste pulled off her boots, unzipped her bag, took out her running shoes, and stowed the boots away. She hummed quietly as she went, slipping on the shoes and lacing them up. Her uniform was red with white lettering, the Laurelhurst colors. It wasn’t quite the right size, and the already-light fabric was even thinner from many washings. The shoes were the painful white of thorough scrubbings with soap and water, all the logos and colors scratched right off, leaving only the cloth and rubber.

“You could come to practice in your running shoes, you know.”

“But I don’t run to practice,” Celeste replied archly.

Caroline snorted. “Whatever.” She rested her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands before closing her eyes. The bench by the table was not high enough for her feet to dangle freely, but she swung them back and forth anyway, scraping across the ground in a steady rhythm that matched up nicely to Celeste’s faint humming. She ground her teeth a bit and looked down at herself.

Everything was there and just like it always was. The bright blue uniform with “AUGUSTA” on it in white, the blue neckerchief, the slim wristwatch, nothing was missing.

“Something wrong, Carrie?”

“Nothing new.”

“Something old?” Celeste smiled at her rival captain as she finished with her shoelaces and stood from the table.

“Not that old.”

“Is it an animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“Fuck you.”

The two athletes looked at each other for a moment, then shared a brief laugh. “Lemme know if I can help,” Celeste added.

“Yeah,” Caroline replied absently, looking over Celeste’s shoulder. “Sure.”

Celeste swiveled around and saw the other runners approaching. She did a quick mental headcount. “That’s everybody, right?”

“Yes, idiot, that is everyone.” Caroline stood up and cupped her hands to her mouth. “All right!” she shouted. “Stretches! You all know the deal!”

“Wait,” Celeste said, confused, “that’s definitely not everyone. Where’s Doug?”

“He sent ahead to let me know he’d be late,” Caroline replied, reaching for her toes.

“You could have told me.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“I thought you’d tell me.”

“Whatever,” Caroline huffed for the second time in five minutes.

“Whatever yourself,” Celeste teased as she stretched her shoulders.

The other runners had spaced themselves out and were warming up. They had sorted themselves by school, Laurelhurst red on one side and Augusta blue on the other. The runners in blue moved in unison, taking care to follow Caroline’s lead. The runners in red did no such thing, each going about their business at their own pace. Some worked their arms, swaying in place as they rotated from side to side. Others sat on the grass, legs extended, reaching in various directions.

One girl lay on her back, eyes skyward, doing nothing. She wore fitted white capris, a red fingerless glove on her right hand, and a sour expression.

“Connors.” Celeste warned. “You should get up.”

“I’ll be ready to run when everyone else is,” the supine figure grumbled.

“Get up, Faith, or I’m sending you home.”

Wordlessly, the offender rolled into a sitting position. She stretched out a single leg and lazily reached for her foot.

“Thank you.” Celeste shifted her attention to Caroline. “So when will the frames be here?”

“He said in his text that he’d need ten more minutes to change his flat. That was seven minutes ago.”

“You can change a flat tire in ten minutes?”

“Doug can, apparently. Actually, make that eight minutes.” Caroline gestured with a nod to the nearest curb, where a blue pickup had just parked. Its doors opened and two people climbed out of the cab. The driver was a young man, pale, with wild hair and wide eyes. He was dressed in a white blazer over a dark shirt and slacks. His fingers were bandaged and stained. The passenger was an Augusta track athlete, in her uniform and a pair of tall Wesco Athenas, spray-painted white.

He climbed up into the bed of the truck and hefted up an armful of hurdles. His passenger hurried over to take them, then lowered them onto the grass. They passed about a dozen hurdles at a time, working quickly to get all sixty out of the truck. The aluminum frames piled up on the grass beside the curb as they went, until all of them lay abour in messy piles. The driver jumped down from the truck into the street, then waved to Caroline.

“Hey!” he called across the green. “We’re here!”

Caroline raised her eyebrows at him by way of answer. He turned to his companion. “C’mon, Chell,” he said. “Let’s get these set up.”

Celeste’s brow furrowed as she remembered something from last practice. She shouted over to the two people moving the hurdles. “Hey Doug! Farther from the ditch this time, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Doug picked up a pair of frames, one in each hand, and walked them a suitable distance from the roadside.

“Whaddya think, Chell, wanna run uphill or downhill today?”

She looked down the hillside to the lake and gave a tiny nod.

“Downhill it is,” he said, and positioned the first hurdle in the grass.

The two of them worked in silence, walking up and down the gentle slope to lay out the hurdles, a few at a time. There was a sign by the curb, warning drivers of the seven-percent grade hillside: steep enough to worry a truck, but only a mild curiosity for a runner. A Laurelhurst girl stopped stretching to join them. Gradually, the rest of the athletes finished warming up and walked over to help move the equipment.

The ground was firm and dry, good for a run. The sun was low, but the sky was still blue. All the wavelets of the lake glittered as the last of the hurdles were put into place. They stood in a long course of four lanes, thirty meters between each frame, fifteen frames in each lane: five hundred meters of hurdles. Near the end of the course, Doug sat down in the grass under a tree, pulling his smartphone from his pocket.

“Thanks for the help,” he said as he sat. “See you all again in a bit.” There was a wave of nods and acknowledgements as the two teams began the jog back up the slope to the start of the course.

Celeste took the opportunity to herd Faith to the side of the running group as they went up the hill. “You having a bad day?” she asked in a low voice, once they were a few strides away from the rest.

“I’m fine,” Faith replied.

“You sure about that?”

“Just let me run, okay?”

“Fine. Don’t lose your temper partway through practice again, clear?”

“Mhm.” Faith pulled away from her captain as the running pack continued up towards the top of the course. Celeste looked to Caroline for some kind of response, but received only an amused shrug.

At the start of the course, the runners formed up and faced each other in a wide semicircle. Caroline stepped into its middle and glanced over the group. “Everyone remember their numbers?” There was a small wave of mumbled agreement.

“Good,” she said, stepping back into the ring. “One through four, you’re up.”

Four runners, two from each school, lined up at the start of the course. They looked away down the length of their lanes and assumed standing start poses. There was a pause as they waited for a signal. “Hell you waitin’ for?” Caroline yelled at them. “Go on, get!” There was a brief laugh from the surrounding circle.

The runners at their marks took off, down the slight slope towards the lakeside. Their paces were similar, and their form was acceptable. Nearly in synchrony, they went over one hurdle, then another, down the way to the end of their lanes.

When the four runners were about halfway to the end, Caroline called up the next group. “Five through eight, to your marks!” she yelled, and four more athletes lined up at the start of the track. Faith took her position at the start of her run, next to another runner in red and two in blue.

Faith did not wait to be laughed at. She began her run without any hesitation, leaving the other three to follow after. It was forty-five meters to the first hurdle, then it was thirty-five, then it was fifteen. In her run, there was no art nor beauty. In her stride, there was no strange levity. She came upon the first hurdle and cleared it without any sensation of flight or of freedom.

Her stride, breath, pulse, they fell into a rhythm that pounded away in her head as Faith counted the steps to the next hurdle. Her form was clean, her strides measured. It was ten meters to the second hurdle, then five. She cleared it, touched down on the far side, and started counting up to the next leap. One leap, then another, then another. She heard her feet on the ground, pounding, pounding. She saw the lane ahead of her, reaching away down the green. There was nothing in the world but the run.

Faith cleared the last hurdle, ran the last few meters down to the end of the course, and doubled over, breathing heavily. The world came back and flooded her senses like someone had switched on a light. The lake, the sunset, the sounds of the other runners filled her ears and eyes and made her dizzy. She plodded over to a nearby tree and leaned against it, feeling the rhythms of her body unlock and become separate again. Her machinehood passed and she was a human again. She spat into the grass and turned her attention back to the running. The last group, thirteen through sixteen, were starting now.

Thirteen was her team captain, Celeste. Fourteen was a new teammate of hers, whose name she had yet to learn. Fifteen and sixteen were the last two runners from Augusta, Caroline and Chell. They broke away from the starting positions and came down the lanes. The team captains ran like veterans. Their form was refined, their pace smooth. They ran like the old practice partners they were, each motivated by a desire not to fall behind the other, keeping exact pace without even looking at each other’s lanes.

The team captains were at the fourth frame when Chell began to pull ahead of them both. She cleared it effortlessly, and surged on to the fifth, then the sixth. She skimmed over the hurdles like an albatross playing over swells. Her dark ponytail flew behind her like a pennant. Her face was radiant, filled with the joy of freedom. Down the green she came to the fifteenth and final hurdle, leaving the others far behind. She leapt over the frame, tucked her head into her arms, and rolled once on the grass, then popped up again, grinning.

The person under the tree, white blazer and black shirt, what was his name? Doug? - applauded, laughing delightedly. Still smiling, she walked over and sat next to him, gesturing for him to pass his water to her. She worked the top off and drank, then passed it back.

Faith looked down at her hands to find them clenched. Her jaw was tight. The edges of her vision were dark. Was her face red? She made herself take a deep breath and release her fists. She gently touched her cheek with the back of her hand, and found that it was hot. She closed her eyes and lowered her head, trying to loosen her bite.

“Nice,” she heard Caroline say, panting. “You run that in your goddamn boots?”

“This girl is unreal,” Celeste said. “Wait, are those - ?”

“Custom-built, full-grain leather,” Doug chimed. “Yes, they are. My girl needed a worthy birthday present.”

“And the paint job?”

“Chell’s own. Wanted to make it personal, I guess.”

A duck on the lake went up and down with the shining wavelets. It was brown and white, tidy and trim. Faith gave it her full attention, blanking out the sounds of the conversation behind her. The trees at the edges of the lake disappeared from her vision. The descending sun, the long shadows, the cool spring breeze, all failed to register. A single brown duck went up and down on the water, and Faith let her breathing fall into its rhythm. She felt her anger loosen and let go of her, and then it was gone.

“All right!” Caroline shouted, hands cupped to her mouth. “Back up to the top, let’s go!” The duck spotted something beneath the water and dipped away, leaving Faith to come back to reality. She shook her head once before beginning the jog back up the track with the rest of the athletes.

At the top of the lanes, the semicircle was formed anew without any fuss. Numbers two, five, six, and ten were called to run. Numbers one, four, eleven, and twelve went next. Each batch waited for the group ahead of them to reach the halfway point before following down the track.

“Three, seven, eight, sixteen, to your marks.”

Faith stepped up to her lane and looked away down its length to the lakeside at the bottom. Chell lined up on her left. Faith waited for her teammate in the lane to take the eighth hurdle. The figure ahead took the leap, touched down, and continued running. Faith drew one more preparatory breath and flung herself into the chase.

The drumming of her stride began. All her other thoughts went dark. She was an engine, completing cycles at full efficiency. The long green lane burned down beneath her as she leapt one marker after the next. On her left and a few steps in front, there was a blurred white albatross, skimming the grass on an unseen wind. It blew ahead of her, flying over the frames.

There was a dark red tint at the edges of Faith’s sight. Distantly, she wondered if she was still breathing properly. She checked: she was still breathing. It was still synchronized with her stride, two steps to the inhale, two steps to the exhale. Her arms cut at the air as they swung free, two counterweights in motion like a flyball governor. Every step of the cycle was locked into place, every step between every leap accounted for. It wasn’t fast enough. The whole thing had to go faster.

Somewhere in her head there was screaming. Maybe it was a human scream. Maybe it was the scream of steel wheels on steel rails. She lunged into her stride, feeling the uptick, feeling the world contract until only the track was left. The white albatross winked out of existence, leaving only the machine on its screaming burn. Her breaths tore in and out through ragged valves. Her legs gathered power for one last jump, and the machine flew over the hurdle, crashing into the grass on the far side. There was a moment of darkness.

Faith blinked a few times until her eyes focused properly. Chell stood over her, hand extended to help her up. Faith felt a laugh build in her chest. Smiling and not knowing why, she took the offered hand and pulled herself up. The laugh came, bitter and pained. Chell tugged her arm and gestured with a nod toward a nearby tree, face full of concern.

“You fly beautifully,” Faith mumbled as she sat at the tree’s base. She sighed, then frowned. “Hey,” she remarked. “This is the second week of practices. Why haven’t I seen you before? Your team captain doesn’t like absences.”

Chell sat and pointed to her bandaged right wrist.

“Ah,” said Faith. “Did you know you’re amazing?”

Shrug.

“I’m the fastest one here when you’re not.”

A smile and a thumbs-up.

“Yeah, well now you’re here.”

Questioning face.

“And you’re faster than me,” Faith elaborated, pained to be uttering the admission of defeat.

“So?” Doug’s voice came from behind, above, and slightly to the right. Faith turned and saw him standing over her, passing Chell her water.

“What do you mean ‘so’?”

“So that five hundred meter you just did was the fastest I’ve seen you do, and I’ve come to all the practices. Hey, want some water?” From his messenger bag, he produced a sealed brand-name water bottle. Faith accepted it, mumbling something that might have been “thank you.”

The team captains were coming down the way now with the last group.

“Connors, you all right?” Celeste asked as she walked to a halt after the last hurdle.

“Yeah, Wilson, I’m fine.”

“I see you’ve met Ms., uh - ” she glanced over to Caroline for help.

“Just ‘Chell’ will do,” Caroline replied, amused. She glanced at her watch. “Hey, Captain Wilson, it’s getting cold early tonight. Do we want to do the full hour or send everyone home?”

“Please do not call me that,” groused Celeste.

“Answer the question, Wilson.” Caroline’s grin was mirrored on the faces of several of the nearby runners listening in.

“Sure, why not. I could use the extra half-hour at home to catch up on things.”

“Aight folks,” Caroline called to the group, “let’s pack up the frames.” She clapped her hands once and the teams went to work, walking up the hill one more time. Faith groaned and rose to her feet.

“Extra half-hour?” she heard Doug ask Chell behind her. “Want to go down to the range?” A pause. “Okay, library trip it is, then.”

The sixteen runners trooped up the seven-percent slope, gathering up the sixty hurdles one by one as they passed by. The chatter gradually picked up as they went. Bits of conversation passed Faith by like a wind full of the rustle of treetops. There were questions about homework, and scheduling, and the ins and outs of Augusta cliques. They floated away on the springtime air as Faith walked up the slope, six hurdles over her shoulder.

Doug climbed up into the bed of his truck. Faith passed the hurdles up to him. He took them with a smile and a “thank you” as she turned away. She crossed her arms over her chest and shivered. The way home was back down to the lakeside, around the jogging track that wrapped the shore, then down half a mile of city blocks. She uncrossed her arms once more, shook out her hands, and left the others to finish cleaning up.

The sun was low on Faith’s left. Light came glancing through the tall residential buildings by the edge of MacArthur park, filtering through the park’s handful of trees, scattering on the ground like grain thrown in handfuls on plowed earth. She shaded her brow with a hand as she walked in and out of the long sunset shadows, along the paved path by the water’s edge.

The stones down at the rim of the lake were slick and green, and tiny waves broke over them with quiet hisses. Faith tuned in to the sound of her breathing, felt the puff of wind as she exhaled and heard the rush as she drew another lung. Her shoes made noises on the pavement as she walked, not sharp enough to be taps, not loud enough to be thumps, not long enough to be grinding. It was just the sound of running shoes, walking home.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Erika Connors prepares dinner and Kate Connors comes home.

At the end of the park, the city resumed, abrupt and unapologetic. Faith stopped at a lighted crosswalk, waiting for her signal. She glanced from rooftop to rooftop as she waited, eyeing the residential towers and the clotheslines strung across their dismal porches. The rumble of road traffic almost drowned the hum of the boxy air conditioning units, stuck out of the sides of the towers, row on row.

The intersection lights changed. Faith’s crosswalk beckoned with a white light and an insistent beeping. She stepped out in front of the row of idling vehicles, keenly aware of the line of dirty paint that only just held back their roaring, two-ton bodies. She hurried past them onto the next sidewalk and continued following the block. The sidewalk lay in the shadow of a tall building. Faith saw the sun disappear behind the tower on her left, and felt the air grow cooler as she walked. She blew a puff of air through her lips and felt it warm her face for a brief moment.

This street was smaller, only two lanes each way. The sounds of the intersection faded behind her, giving way to the distant trumpet of a street performer and a clattering of waste bins as someone took out their trash. Faith’s shoes padded on the sidewalk as she went, a quiet counterpoint.

At the next crossing, there was no traffic. The crossing light glared its angry red as Faith glanced from side to side, then darted over. She reached up as she walked and tossed her hair with a finger. It fell back into place, brushing her shoulder. She looked ahead and up at the slice of sky between the towers, wondering what word described its color best.

She was home before she knew it. A blurred, silver version of her face stared back at her as she watched the elevator doors and waited. Beyond the closed doors, machinery ground and clunked and whined. The noises stopped and the doors opened. Faith stepped into the empty elevator and requested her floor. The elevator’s buttons were large and dimly lit. Some of them were cracked, and all of them were dusty.

The world jerked, and the elevator began its climb. Faith shuddered as she felt the floor tug briefly at her legs. She turned and leaned against of the walls, back to back with her reflection in the smudged glass. She crossed her arms, lowered her chin, and sighed. The elevator climbed slowly, grinding as it went. The sounds of the old motors echoed in the empty space above and below.

The motors stopped once more and the doors opened. The hall was lined with apartment doors on one side. The other side was a single continuous window through which the sunset leveled into Faith’s eyes. She stepped out, a hand shading her eyes and the other fishing in her back pocket. She stopped at door 708 and fiddled in the reluctant lock with an old key. It clicked, clattered, and clicked again. She twisted at the knob unsuccessfully. Faith grunted and twisted a few moments longer before the door finally swung in.

“Hey,” her mother greeted as she entered. “You’re home early.”

“The captain said it was too cold to keep running.” Faith closed the door behind her and turned the lock back over into closed position.

“All right then. Come help me cook.”

“Okay.” Faith ducked through a nearby doorway into her bedroom. She slapped down her key on a bedside table, tugged off her glove and dropped it on the bed. Gracefully, she dropped to a kneel and undid one shoelace, then the other. She kicked her running shoes off and took half a moment to watch them tumble to a stop on the carpet.

Her socks wadded in one hand, Faith crossed back through the common area to the washroom and opened the tap. She lobbed her socks into the basket in the corner, then splayed her hands in the sink. Cold water ran over her fingers as she rubbed them together, eyeing herself in the mirror. There was a long green streak up her left cheek. She rubbed the grass stain off her face with a thumb, then wiped the water off her face with a towel. There was a worrying clunk behind the wall when Faith closed the tap. She rolled her eyes and reentered the central room of the apartment.

“There you are,” said her mother. “Put on rice for three, will you?”

“Three?” Faith asked as she knelt on the kitchen floor and opened a cabinet full of pots and lids.

“Your father was invited to an impromptu office dinner to celebrate the... what was it?”

Faith stood up, pot in one hand and lid in the other. She set the lid on the counter and kicked the cabinet shut. “Something about closing on a big contract. I didn’t ask any questions about it. Sounded boring.”

“What was the guy’s name, though?” Erika Connors’ face was wrinkled with the frustration of forgetting. Her hands worked swiftly as she shredded the bamboo sprout on the cutting board in front of her.

“It was a woman: somebody ‘Vance.’ ”

“ ‘Alice,’ right?”

“Think so.” Faith opened another cabinet with her foot. She reached into the sack of rice inside and pulled out a measuring cup. “Four measures?” she asked.

“Mhm.” Erika continued to sliver the young bamboo without looking up.

“Anyway, she does country gigs and Dad’s label is convinced she’s about to go huge, so they’re buying her away from her previous publisher. Or something like that. I dunno how music works.” After measuring out the fourth cup of rice, Faith dropped the measure back into the sack and swung the cabinet shut. She carried the pot over and set it in the bottom of the kitchen sink.

The front door rattled. Faith opened the tap and stirred the rice with her fingers, filtering for bits of dirt or dead insects. The rice clouded the water a thick white, like springtime rainclouds. The tap hissed. The door rattled once more, then the knob turned and it opened.

“Hey,” Erika said as her younger daughter entered. “How was sword practice?”

Kate grunted, shrugged, and dropped her bokken in the umbrella stand by the door.

“Oh?” Erika prodded.

“My day was fine,” Kate replied, rubbing her eyes.

“Good, good. Wash up, then come help me cook.”

“Will do.”

Faith closed the tap and drained the excess water into the sink, leaving a pot of damp rice. She poked it with a finger, face wrinkled as she fought a yawn. She opened the tap again and watched the rice as it sank beneath a layer of significantly clearer water. The water climbed slowly up the finger she held to the surface of the rice. After a moment, satisfied with the amount of water, she closed the tap once more and set down the pot on the counter. She lidded it and moved it to an unlit burner on the stove.

“Need anything else?” Faith asked.

“No,” Erika replied, “I’ll have your sister help me with the rest. Go sit in your room or whatever it is you do.” The two smiled at each other, then Erika looked back down to her work, waving her daughter towards the bedroom door.

The door closed behind her. Faith leaned against it, eyes on her ceiling. She took a deep breath, inhaling the alone-in-her-room quiet that she couldn’t get anywhere else. The sky was blue and purple through the east-facing windows. It was the back half of the sunset, the forgotten and misunderstood half, the night coming up from below the horizon like growing grass. Faith blew it a kiss before sitting at her desk.

There were some unfinished math problems out on the desk, papers loosely scattered over each other and over an open book. She swept them to the side with one hand, switching on her lamp with the other. The finish of the desk was uneven, black, and aging. The texture stood out in the glare from the lamp, patternless and ugly. On the wall behind the desk was a half-filled chart of daily run times and personal bests.

Faith reached for her pencil cup and drew a cheap black-ink ballpoint with a missing cap. Sighing, she filled out the entry for the day with her track times. She crossed out her previous personal best five-hundred meter time and wrote in the new time, underlining it and doodling a happy face beside. She dropped the pen back in the cup.

Next to her pencil cup was her phone, facedown. Faith flipped it over, unlocked the screen, and picked it up. She opened her messages to Celeste and sent a new one: “Do you have Chell’s times from practice today?” She switched the screen off again and put the phone back on the desk. She looked up at her poster of run times. In its upper right corner there was a large printed box. “Training Goal,” it was labeled. The box on the poster was empty.

Faith looked at the empty box, then down at her pencil cup. She reached over and chose the red pen from it, then looked back up at the blank space on the chart. She stared at her phone, waiting. The sounds of the kitchen were faint through the bedroom door. Pans clattered, the stove hissed as something boiled over. Erika yelled something including the words “pay attention.”

Faith’s gaze was unfocused, her chin on her hands, when her phone lit up with a reply from Celeste. “I thought you’d ask,” it said. “Here.” Some numbers followed. Her eyes widened, then narrowed again. She shook her head in frustration as she typed out a minimal reply. “Thanks.” She uncapped the red pen, standing slightly in her chair to reach the far corner of the chart.

There it was, twelve seconds faster than her personal best. She capped the red pen and put it back in the cup. She stood from the desk, pushed in the chair, and backed across the room to the far wall. Faith leaned into the wall, crossed her arms, stared down the poster as if it might be cowed into changing its contents. The world slipped away as she stared.

The night skyline of the city began to take shape outside the window as lights went up in windows and on rooftops and in streets, sketching out the edges of buildings and painting the undersides of the clouds. The lone lamp in Faith’s room drew a circle of yellow light on the ceiling, lit up the wall-hanging with her run times scribbled in boxes. Viewed from out the window, it was another yellow point, a drop of color in the impressionist city horizon.

Every small glow was someone’s. Behind every lit window, someone stood, or sat, or lay. In a house up the city hill, Chell lay supine on her carpeted bedroom floor. Beside her, her phone sat on the carpet, wired to a pocket projector, trained on the ceiling, and to a small set of speakers. The vague shapes of chess pieces flickered above her, and a quiet voice from the speakers gave a thorough analysis of the Tartakower Defense.

Chell was perfectly still, eyes focused, hands folded over her sternum. From outside her closed bedroom door there came the sounds of a hungry cat, followed by a woman’s voice saying “Hush there, Bendy. I’ll feed you.” A piece moved on the ceiling as the analysis continued, touching briefly on Spassky’s personal life and the Icelandic climate before returning to the game.

“Faith,” Erika called. “Dinner.”

“Be right there,” Faith called back as she switched off her desk lamp and drew her curtains shut.


End file.
